Colin Dickey’s The Canny Valley: The Self-Help Avant-Garde

Somewhere in the distant future, in the derelict remnant of a liberal
arts college named the Martha Graham Academy, a feckless student named
Jimmy turns out an academic dissertation on the self-help books of the
twentieth century. This is Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, and
since it’s Atwood, it’s dystopian—a future world in which biotech is
king and the study of serious literature has been displaced by the
analysis of books like Improve Your Self-Image, The Twelve-Step Plan for Assisted Suicide, and How to Make Friends and Influence People.

Like all dystopian literature, it’s meant as a cautionary tale, but I
decided to take Atwood seriously for a moment, and try to study, or at
least think about, self-help as a genre. After all, in many ways the
future is already here. The rhetoric and style of self-help has
infiltrated the literary landscape in more ways than we’re ready to
admit—it’s shape-shifting and mutable and it’s filling holes in the
writing world in odd ways. The goal of this column being to explore and
play with different kinds of genres and different kinds of possibility,
something as risible and easily dismissed as self-help seemed worth
investigating.

***

Self-help, as a genre and as a term, begins with Samuel Smiles’ book, Self-Help,
self-published (naturally) in 1859 four years after being rejected by
Routledge. Smiles was not the only one at the time exhorting his fellow
men to better themselves: the first half of the nineteenth century were
awash with various movements that promoted panaceas to cure all of
society’s ills: phrenologists, teetotalers, vegetarians, hydrotherapy
advocates, anti-lacing societies (against corsets: “Natural waists, or
no wives!”), and on and on—all promising simple, quick fixes that would
lead to utopian harmony.

Smiles rejected all of that; the key to success, he argues in Self-Help, is
knowledge and hard-work. “Men must necessarily be the active agents of
their own well-being and well-doing,” he writes, “and that, however much
the wise and the good may owe to others, they themselves must in the
very nature of things be their own best helpers.” Reading more like a
school-marm than a self-help guru, Smiles advises us that the

greatest results in life are usually attained by simple
means, and the exercise of ordinary qualities. The common life of
every day, with its cares, necessities, and duties, affords ample
opportunity for acquiring experience of the best kind; and its most
beaten paths provide the true worker with abundant scope for effort and
room for self-improvement. The road of human welfare lies along
the old highway of steadfast well-doing; and they who are the most
persistent, and work in the truest spirit, will usually be the most
successful.

What perseveres about Smiles’ book, some 150 years later, is the
drive to find a language that reaches through the page and convinces the
reader to be better than s/he currently is. But if Smiles’ book
launched a genre, the genre Self-Help launched is fundamentally
antithetical to its own founding. The subsequent history of the
self-help genre has been largely bent on proving Smiles wrong: positive
thinking does have power, riches can be got quick, highly successful people do have habits. There is a Secret.

Self-help, properly speaking, is not a genre but an affect, a
re-packaging of the same sentiment, altered slightly through repetition
but largely unchanged. And it is this sentiment which has lately left
the confines of the self-help section and begun infiltrating genres
previously assumed to have more seriousness and merit. One finds it in
pop neuroscience, in writers like Malcolm Gladwell and Jonah Lehrer, and
in Naomi Wolf’s recent Vagina: A Biography. And one finds it in memoir, in Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat Pray Love and James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces.

The high-profile world of pop neuroscience so thoroughly mirrors the
junk science and quick-fix promise of phrenology that it’s almost not
worth pointing out, save for the fact that gurus like Gladwell are still
peddling snake-oil on the TED circuit for tens of thousands of dollars
per lecture. As Isaac Chotiner summed it up in his review of Jonah
Lehrer’s latest book:

Imagine is really a pop-science book, which
these days usually means that it is an exercise in laboratory-approved
self-help. Like Malcolm Gladwell and David Brooks, Lehrer writes
self-help for people who would be embarrassed to be seen reading it. For
this reason, their chestnuts must be roasted in “studies” and given a
scientific gloss. The surrender to brain science is particularly
zeitgeisty. Their sponging off science is what gives these writers the
authority that their readers impute to them, and makes their
simplicities seem very weighty.

Latent behind Lehrer and Gladwell is this same self-help motivation:
this simple thing can change your life for the better. Lehrer’s book on
creativity, Imagine, ends with this promise:

For the first time, we can see the source of imagination,
that massive network of electrical cells that lets us constantly form
new connections between old ideas…. Thanks to modern science, we’ve been
blessed with an unprecedented creative advantage, a meta-idea that we
can apply at the individual level. For the first time in human history,
it’s possible to learn how imagination actually works.

We are not far in these lines from Atwood, and the idea that human
imagination and spirit has finally been decoded and can be maximized for
earning potential. One tries to imagine the ramifications of Lehrer’s
nonsensical claim that science has given us “an unprecedented creative
advantage”—over what? And what will it mean to be “more creative”? More
books published? More “Like a Rolling Stones” written? More widgets
manufactured? The mind boggles.

But this is the foundation of self-help, after all: unlock the
secrets that make me better, and then tell me what to do. Give me
actionable intelligence, make me more creative, increase the percentage
of solutions I’m able to devise. Give me a plan because I’m incapable of
making my own; give me a plan because mine isn’t working.

This impulse to boil down the messy complexity of the world into
simple statements, slogans and clichés, lies behind the majority of
memoirs that appropriate this same self-help mold—particularly and most
obviously, the ersatz and disgraced memoir/novel, A Million Little Pieces by
James Frey. Frey’s rhetorical trick, other than the fictive
sensationalism that he was later taken to task by Oprah for, is a
repeated tic in which any semi-complicated notion or philosophy is
always reduced, at the end of the paragraph, to a stock cliché. His
reading and paraphrasing of the Tao Te Ching takes up several
pages, then ends on this note: “Although I am no expert on this or
anything related to this or anything at all except being a fuck-up, I
seem to understand what this book this weird beautiful enlightened
little book is saying to me. Live and let live, do not judge, take life
as it comes and deal with it, everything will be okay.” Likewise, James’
friend Leonard offers a heartfelt speech on misery and triumph that
finishes with: “Be smart, be strong, be proud, live honorably and with
dignity, and just hold on.”

Live and let live. Do not judge. Live honorably and with dignity.
Hold on. Self-help wants nothing more to simplify the world down to
these clichés. It’s not a coincidence, I think, that both Frey and
Lehrer were caught in scandals regarding fabrications—Frey of life
experience, Lehrer of source quotes. When you cannot reduce the world to
slogans, you invent the world and you invent data so that you can. What
both of these scandals suggest is that, taken to its extreme, the job
of self-help is strangely impossible. Life is too messy, and attempts to
reduce it to the firm and unquestionable lesson or cliché requires
doctoring the evidence.

***

But the road goes both ways: if self-help has infected the literary,
the literary has also recently begun to infect self-help, in ways that
are infinitely more promising than Lehrer and Frey. At the other end of
this spectrum is Cheryl Strayed’s advice column for The Rumpus, Dear
Sugar, which was recently collected and published as Tiny Beautiful Things.
Strayed, like Frey, deals in—if not clichés, then slogans. “Trust
yourself,” she writes in one column, “It’s Sugar’s golden rule. Trusting
yourself means living out what you already know to be true.” Another
2,000 word post features the maxim: “Write like a
motherfucker”—helpfully available now on mugs and t-shirts.

What’s interesting about Strayed’s column, though, is that these
slogans and maxims are, as often as not, near the beginning of the
column rather than the end. The best posts dispense advice almost
perfunctorily, before moving into long personal essays—essays that at
times can seem like digressions. “Several months after my mother died I
found a glass jar of stones tucked in the far reaches of her bedroom
closet,” begins one answer.

I was moving her things out of the house I’d thought of
as home, but that no longer was. It was a devastating process—more
brutal in its ruthless clarity than anything I’ve ever experienced or
hope to again—but when I had that jar of rocks in my hands I felt a kind
of elation I cannot describe in any other way except to say that in the
cold clunk of its weight I felt ever so fleetingly as if I were holding
my mother.

At times like this, the original letter writer almost seems beside
the point; Steve Almond gets it right in his introduction when he
describes Dear Sugar as not a “column” but an “ad hoc memoir.”

Sometimes, these stories loop back to the matter at hand, but
sometimes they don’t. After confessing to searching for objects that
would give her her mother back “in some indefinable and figurative way
that would make it okay for me to live the rest of my life without her,”
Strayed goes on to conclude “I didn’t find it in those stones…in spite
of my hopes on that sad day. It wasn’t anywhere, in anything, and it
never would be.” These personal stories often as not don’t resolve, and
don’t offer a moral beyond pain and the absence of tidy redemption.
These essays often only masquerade as self-help. She is at her best when
she moves beyond the central thrust of self-help into messiness and
ambiguity; as a reader, I’m most annoyed when these essays return to the
lesson. It’s here that the somewhat artificial distance between seeker
and sage reasserts itself, and why I find myself tending to disagree
with Almond’s assertion that these essays represent “radical empathy.”

Radical empathy suggests to me not these fairly successful advice
columns, but the disastrous advice columnist from Nathaniel West’s Miss Lonelyhearts. West’s
eponymous columnist is so radically empathetic he cannot write; he is
overwhelmed by the endless drawer of letters, “all of them alike,
stamped from the dough of suffering with a heart-shaped cookie knife.”
He is rendered speechless; he cannot get beyond the first, empty
sentence of his never-written column: “Life is worth while, for
it is full of dreams and peace, gentleness and ecstasy, and faith that
burns like a clear white flame on a grim dark altar.” Not unlike Dear
Sugar, Miss Lonelyhearts’ advice column began as a joke, though here the
joke turns sour; unlike his editor Shrike, he can’t distance himself
from the morass of human suffering, cannot laugh it off with bromides
and lessons and clichés. It’s no way to be; West’s novel is a cynic’s
cautionary tale—if you truly open yourself to other humans, you’ll
drown. In radical empathy lies death.

On one end of the self-help spectrum, then, is the impossible
reduction of the world into slogans that can only be carried off through
sleight-of-hand, invention, and duplicity. At the other end is Miss Lonelyhearts’ radical
empathy, with its attendant speechlessness, nihilism, and
self-destruction. The genre of self-help lies on the curve that years
towards these two separate asymptotes—it can approach either pole but
never fully get there without imploding somehow. The world is too messy,
empathy is too messy.

Contrary to Atwood’s skepticism, this is perhaps what makes self-help
such a potentially fascinating genre, and leaves me wondering if
there’s room for more writers like Strayed to attempt it. It seems that
there’s still unexplored possibilities—like an unstable isotope, it
exists between two impossible poles, quivering with power somewhere in
between.

Comments

Loved this. I’ve had an essay brewing for a while now on finding
the line between being vulnerable and open and being a complete nihilist
that it’s definitely time to revisit. Coincidentally, just started
Miss Lonelyhearts last night. Loved that line about the cookie knife.